


there are three sisters

by cosmic_kid



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 04:52:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4377869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_kid/pseuds/cosmic_kid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short descriptive work on the Black sisters</p>
            </blockquote>





	there are three sisters

There are three sisters. One is made of-

Oh fuck it. Cliches lose meaning when you’ve got magic. It’s easy to say: “one is made of fire, one is made of ice, one is made of wind” but really: when the sisters can so easily become fire and ice and wind, when they can freeze and burn and blow away whatsoever they choose with just a word and a gesture, then there’s no real basis in comparison, is there? It’d be like calling the sisters knives, guns, bombs; but of course, in their world, that’s true of anybody.

So maybe things that aren’t so tangible. One sister can be obsession. Hunger. Desire. All these things that start from something noble and good and then twist and mutate and sprout thorns like a cursed vine. One sister can be courage. Resistance. Defiance. But she can also be cold and closed-off, she can throw her heritage into order, try and build a life out of half-lives that constantly deplete themselves. And the third sister…the third sister can be reserve. But she can also be ferocity. She can be defiance, but she can also be refined. She can be all things and none of them. She can be a mask.

There are three sisters, but they pretend there are two. 

It’s so easy to burn away the hard parts of life when a word unlocks unimaginable power. Betrayal isn’t something you can touch, or feel, but rage is easy to dispense: fire or ice, it doesn’t matter. Just say the right words. When they hear she has a daughter one is enraged, spitting curses of both kinds- those that blossom from a wand and the deeper kind, made of words that don’t need magic to have power. The other, though, is silent. She has learned even more the value of silence. There is a war and they are fighting, but this sister has the smallest idea that, perhaps, there will be life larger than war, larger even than the tapestry-woven history draped along ancient walls. There is life inside of her, life so tiny no one knows about it yet, but to her it feels more immense than any magic she has ever known.

Wars come and go. The slippery pull themselves through chains and questions. The devout scream obscenities and are locked away forever. 

There are three sisters, but now they each believe they are the only ones left.

Wars come and go, come and go, but children come too and they don’t go. They grow and love and laugh and try and fail and become adults far too quickly. And suddenly nothing matters anymore. Wars come and go, but there are always mothers. There are so many different ways of fighting. There is so much to fight against. Two sisters understand this and one never will. For their whole lives they have been playing a game of addition and subtraction, mathematics played out in dangerous lines of magic and blood and all that they owe to themselves, to each other, to the people they love.

Wars come and go.

There are three sisters. Now there are two.

Don’t waste tears over a hollow shell, emptied by madness, emptied by vulgar lust and senseless rage. Don’t waste tears over a woman who’d so thoroughly turned herself to nothing. Two sisters now, who are things like: loss and shame, grief and ash, blood and bone. They do not speak to one another because nothing is easy in this gutted world, but they do not hate one another anymore either, because there is so little room left for old hurts when so many new ones have blossomed.

There are two sisters and they are made of that hard, gritted despair that makes one cling to what they have left, build whatever castles they can before the next wave comes. They are creatures of magic and scars and feverish, desperate love, feeding into the fire and taking from it, both of them with burnt hands.

There were three sisters once and once they loved each other very much in the way only children can, in the way only sisters can. They were made of each other before they were made of anything else. But that was never meant to be enough.


End file.
